About Me

I'm a Christian, married, father of five, and worked as a high school teacher of English and History for twenty five years. The stress forced me into retirement. I've wanted to write as long as I can remember, because as soon as stories were read to me I wanted to make up my own.Now I can write full time, which I always wanted to do.

Monday, March 10, 2008

Let history show...

Reading some of the blogs I've encountered is a real learning experience. One blogger described some of the hard-core feminists she encountered among academics, as rejecting the idea that a woman should ever love a man. It gets me thinking: if SEXISM is just as obnoxious as RACISM, then it is one of the blind spots of our age that such sexism is tolerated, when racism is so widely condemned. But then, look at the past. In the early and middle Twentieth Century, people could make racist statements and hold racist views, and still keep their social and intellectual respectability. Politicians and commentators could suggest and make laws that differentiated between members of different races. In Australia we once had the "White Australia Policy" and people talked about the "Yellow Peril", a quite unpleasant way to refer to Asian human beings. And in the U.S. the Ku Klux Klan had considerable support. Nowadays history has condemned such attitudes, and some people have a less complimentary place in history than they might have liked. In the U.S. I wonder how many people admire Nathan Bedfore Forrest, founder of the Ku Klux Klan? Hopefully we reject racist views. And yet we still permit people with grossly sexist views to keep their academic and social standing. There are women who say that "All men are rapists." There are women who want to have children by artificial means to avoid contact with a man. There are women who suggest that there is no injustice in a man being jailed for a rape he did not commit, because all men are rapists and deserve it. There are women who say that a woman's word alone should be enough for a man to be convicted of sexual assault! There should be no testing of proof! These people still get a place in the media, hold university posts even though they show to same type of attitudes that the Ku Klux Klan do; that is, for belonging to a certain biological category, a human should be rejected and condemned. When is the Western world going to realize: vicious sexism, including hostile female chauvinism, is an evil that damaged the world; and the advocate of such views compromises their own humanity by their own thinking becoming so jaundiced and prejudiced. I HOPE, that in the same way we now reject racist attitudes, we will also reject sexist attitudes - not only from men but from women as well!

3 comments:

Very well said! I cannot believe the ignorance of people sometimes. They are driven by hatred, fear, rejection, bitterness. And while it may be very difficult, we still have to love them as Christ loves them.

It makes me reflect, though, about my own idiosyncrasies, my own hatred and judgements. Thank you for your post!

In my area, one of the stories du jour is about a young girl, fifteen, who for the second time in a year has had a man commit statutory rape. The girl looks much older for her age, hangs out until all hours of the night, and when she asks out a date (who are generally between 21 and 25) she tells them she's 19 and shows them her myspace which claims she is 19 and divorced.

Both times, after the pair had had sex, she revealed her true age. The boyfriends, in an attempt to do the right thing, would go to her father to try and explain things. These are only the two who felt bad about the situation, who knows how many others the girl has slept with who did not come forward.

The father had the two who came forward arrested immediately.

So the controversy in my area is whether one or both past boyfriends should be released, and whether the girl should be taken from her parents who clearly are not winning parents of the year awards for letting their underage child frolic around under the moonlight with men almost a decade older than her.